The Detroit People Mover celebrates its 20th birthday this
month. More than a year before it opened in 1987, Timemagazine printed
an unflattering preview of the coming attraction titled "Horizontal Elevator to
Nowhere." Estimating the project to be a year late and 50 percent over budget,
Time detailed numerous defects and problems, with the most notable mistake being
the decision to build it at all. One Detroit resident was quoted as saying that
it was "a rich folks’ roller coaster," and a Reagan administration transit chief
predicted that it could become "the least cost-effective transit project in the
last 20 years." The People Mover has repeatedly revisited these themes as if
they were stations on its tiny circuit.

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The system is a model of inefficiency. According to reports
submitted to the Federal Transit Administration for the decade 1997-2006, the
People Mover's operational costs exceeded $3 per passenger mile every year and
topped $5 per passenger mile for five of those years. In 1999, it spiked to $14.64. Consider
that New York City’s famously efficient subways regularly run at around 30 cents
per passenger mile and that most of Michigan’s largest city bus systems do the
job for around $1 or less — including the Detroit Department of Transportation
buses that even run within the People Mover’s route.

The federal government’s estimated number of daily rides
steadily eroded from 70,000 to 20,000 as the People Mover project stumbled from
planning toward completion. After the first eight months in operation, The
Detroit Newsreported that the government’s daily rider expectation was
just 16,500, and that even this would probably not be met because only 13,207
daily rides had been given during its very best single month to that point.

The "people" are still not being moved. According to a
December 2006 Detroit News article, about 10 percent of the tram’s seats are
used, and ridership figures reported to the FTA for 2006 worked out to 6,323
rides per day. Largely because Detroit hosted a Super Bowl during the reporting
period, the underwhelming total for 2006 reflects the best People Mover
year of any of the previous 10. For the four prior years the rides per day
worked out to an average of just 3,915.

Some years were worse. A People Mover station was planned
to help the financially struggling yet historic J.L. Hudson retail outlet, but
the store closed its doors before the system was completed, leaving a track
that still went past an empty 439-foot-tall building. Before imploding the old
store in October of 1998, then-Mayor Dennis Archer stated: "Today, we say
goodbye to years of frustration." But frustration continued for the People
Mover, as falling rubble damaged the track. The resulting service delays through
1999 cut usage that year to 2,090 rides per day.

Mayor Coleman Young was the People Mover’s original
champion and first to experience its frustrations. When ridership during the
first year was falling well short of expectations, he proposed a city budget
that would have increased the system’s subsidy from $5.9 million to $8.3
million. Demonstrating questionable priorities, his budget also proposed a $9.8
million cut to the city police. This would have eliminated 264 law enforcement
jobs at a time when the violent crime rate was rising and people were referring
to the Motor Cityas the "Murder City."

This subsidy eventually became standard practice. For most
of the past decade, 85 to 90 percent of the annual bill for the system’s
operating expenses has come from the city budget — usually over $8 million and
sometimes more than $10 million — in a city with one of the nation’s highest
poverty rates. Ironically, a 2004 survey by The Detroit News revealed that fewer
than 30 percent of the People Mover’s riders are Detroit residents.

Another telling statistic about the users: ride figures for
Saturdays routinely dwarf the work-week daily ride numbers. The vast majority of
the system’s users are clearly suburbanites and out-of-town visitors, who pay
only a 50-cent per ride fare that regularly covers less than 10 percent of the
tram’s annual operating cost, and often less than 5 percent. The People Mover
celebrates many wasteful accomplishments as it turns 20, but few stand taller
than fulfilling what that wise Detroiter predicted back in 1986: it really is a
rich folks’ roller coaster.

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Kenneth M. Braun is a policy analyst specializing
in fiscal and budgetary issues for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a
research and educational institute headquartered in Midland, Mich.
Permission to reprint in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided that the
author and the Center are properly cited.